Jessica L. Wright, the acting under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, said today that the Defense Department must maintain its commitment to diversity and inclusion, which contribute to mission success.

She asserted that diversity helps civilian and military employees perform well because they “represent the nation in our workforce.”

The Defense Department not only talks “about diversity in terms of race and gender, and ethnicity, but it is much more than that in my mind,” Wright said. She declared that diversity included “your thought process, how you grew up, [and] what you can add to the greater good because of your background.”

Wright, the very model of a modern retired major general in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard, was speaking Tuesday on best practices for inclusion and diversity at an event hosted by the German Marhsall Fund of the United States.

The webpage for the event, titled “Mission Critical: Transatlantic Security and Diversity,” declared, “it is a security imperative for military leaders to proactively advance diversity and inclusion (D&I) best practices,” because of the “rapid demographic change [and] advances in gender and LGBT equity and a new generation of veterans in NATO countries.”